… shrinking market for law students in a manner so byzantine it would take up a chapter of Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ if Hieronymus Wolf were still alive. Then, after talking to a buddy on the Georgetown University law faculty, she began to realize that the very same byzantine practice goes on there, and is in fact spreading among all but the lowest ranked law schools in America.
The lowest ranked can’t do it because it involves netting (details here) huge shoals of second-year transfer students from law schools in the abyssopelagic rather than hadalpelagic zone.
Although I guess if you’re the nadir in the States – like, for instance, Arizona Summit (someone there probably thought it’d be clever … distracting? … to name the place Summit) you can try harvesting a school of foreign fish (though given many differences among legal systems, this would be a challenge).
The small fry are starting to fight back. Not only is Arizona Summit fucking with its first-year curriculum, making it difficult both to get a good grade point average and to have taken the sorts of courses you need on your transcript to move to the second year curriculum at many schools. Also:
Arizona Summit students have to meet with a dean at Arizona Summit before they transfer and before they can get their transcripts.
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Before their transcripts are released, female Arizona Summit students have to submit to a mandatory transvaginal ultrasound.
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Just kidding.
That’s not happening yet.
February 4th, 2015 at 8:14AM
No transfer student is going to sue–if you willingly transfer and even pay more, you’ll have a tough time making a case. If, on the other hand, you attended a school under the impression that admissions were competitive, and then the school turned around and admitted a lot of weaker students, you’d have a reasonable argument that you’ve been the victim of a bait & switch. Sounds good enough to me for a class action suit. If only those law students knew some trained lawyers with lots of time on their hands . . .
February 4th, 2015 at 9:00AM
It’s tough to get too excited about this when it is exactly the way that the current US president got into an Ivy League university.
February 4th, 2015 at 9:44AM
It’s tough to get too excited about this when it is exactly the way that the current US president got into an Ivy League university.
Points for getting a partisan slam into an otherwise unrelated post. Deductions for the silliness of it, though.
February 4th, 2015 at 2:23PM
…exactly the way… Because Occidental is exactly like Arizona Summit? Am I missing something?
February 9th, 2015 at 9:44AM
The transfer backdoor has been wide open at many places for years in both undergraduate and some graduate professional programs, and it exists not to give disadvantaged slow starters a second chance at a prestige degree after excelling at their initial schools, but to top up the institutional finances of the transfer institution. Transfers typically get much smaller amounts of institutional aid, so these students (or Uncle Sugar, or the state, or other outside funding source) pay more.
The level of academic denial concerning many aspects of the current president’s career never fails to amaze.